Following Microsoft’s decision to kill the Kin platform earlier this month and a massive fire sale after low sales (rumored to be between 500-8000 devices total depending on who’s counting) two months after launch, Verizon employees have confirmed that sales of the Kin One and Kin Two devices will be halted today in stores. The devices are still available for sale online with no immediate word on if the devices will remain in the lineup after existing stock is sold and the devices will no longer be sold internationally via Vodafone as initially planned.
The Kin platform faced serious challenges from the outset as it did not support storage expansion or third-party applications, nor did it feature the applications that its intended target audience would use the most as the devices were launched with rudimentary support for Facebook and Twitter, while not even supporting instant messaging or calendar functionality until the recent announcement of a future update later this summer.
Ultimately, the Kin will be relegated to the footnotes of Microsoft’s mobile platform history as it struggles with its attempts to regain marketshare in the mobile operating system landscape while dealing with its own issues of too many platforms and decreasing support for its current Windows Mobile platform before the launch of Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone 7 is expected to include support for the Kin’s major features in The Loop and the Kin Studio via updates in the future.
Image courtesy of PhoneArena
Update: Verizon has pulled the sales listings for the Kin One and Kin Two on its online store, while an internal employee memo has confirmed the sales halt, with new instructions to return all remaining inventory to the distributor.
Microsoft released the Kin, with many missing features, but promised that the shortcomings would be fixed by updates sometime in the future.
With the axing of the platform, those updates never came.
Now Microsoft is at it again, an exact repeat of the Kin debacle.
Windows Phone 7 will be released later this year, despite missing many features and much functionality. Microsoft is once again promising that the Windows Phone 7 shortcomings will be fixed “via updates in the future.” Sound familiar?
Windows 7 Phone is already doomed.
The Kin should have been marketed as an affordable prepay service for teens and young adults. Trying to pretend like its a PDA and charging the same rates as Andrioid, BB, or Web OS phones is what really killed it.
But, Windows 7 is what Microsoft is focusing on. I mean, the Kin died because they had Windows Phone 7 to fall back on. If WP7 fails, they got nothing to fall back on.